Sasha Cooke

American mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke is a graduate of Rice University and the Juilliard School. A former member of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, she also attended the Music Academy of the West, the Aspen Music Festival, the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Institute, the Wolf Trap Foundation, the Marlboro Music Festival, and Central City Opera’s and Seattle Opera’s young artist programs.

Ms. Cooke’s 2013-14 symphonic engagements include appearances with the New York Philharmonic (in Britten’s Spring Symphony), the Chicago Symphony, and performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with both the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and Columbus Symphony. She will make her debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Indianapolis Symphony; and she will make her role debut as the title character in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena at Opéra National de Bordeaux. As a recitalist, she debuts at Wigmore Hall with pianist Julius Drake and performs at the Univeristy of Arkansas-Little Rock, Emory University, and Matinee Musicale in Duluth, Minnesota. She will return to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in concert with Opus One and David Shifrin; this program will be reprised with Celebrity Series of Boston at Longy School of Music’s Pickman Hall. She will also appear with Chamber Music Northwest and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Ms. Cooke will perform in the West Coast premiere and debut recording of Mohammed Fairouz’s Symphony No. 3 (Poems and Prayers), appear with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Philip Glass’s The Civil Wars, and perform a new commissioned work by Joby Talbot. In March she will appear with the SFS in Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 on the Orchestra’s European Tour.

Highlights of Ms. Cooke’s previous seasons include her San Francisco Opera debut in the title role in the world premiere of Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene; as well as her role debuts as Magnolia in Show Boat at Houston Grand Opera and as Sonja in Dominick Argento’s The Aspern Papers at Dallas Opera. Ms. Cooke made her San Francisco Symphony debut in 2009 and became a Shenson Young Artist in 2010.